Pre-national Arab political loyalty ranked religion first, dynasty second, ethnicity last

Evidence

Political identity and loyalty were still basically determined by three consid­ erations. The first was religious or rather communal, that is to say membership of the universal family of Islam. This was by far the most important and effective. At the second level came allegiance to a specific state or dynasty—the two meaning very much the same thing. For the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent this meant the Ottoman house; for those of Egypt it meant the khedivial ruling house, under Ottoman suzerainty; for those of the Arabian peninsula, a variety of local rulers. At the third and lowest level, identity was ethnic or local, but this was of the most rudimentary kind, that of the family, the clan, at best the tribe. As a basis of political allegiance to a ruler it persisted chiefly in the Arabian peninsula and its borderlands. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 830

Categorization

• XREF: The three-tier loyalty hierarchy (religion, dynasty, ethnic) is a useful comparative template against Milgrom’s and other institutional accounts of pre-modern identity.